


the unsealed aperture

by ragnasok



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Character Death Fix, Future Fic, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, Magic, Mutual Pining, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sibling Incest, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-05-29 00:03:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15060698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ragnasok/pseuds/ragnasok
Summary: A hundred years have passed since Thanos was defeated, since those he destroyed with the Gauntlet were returned to life--and since Loki was not. Thor mostly keeps out of the limelight these days, dedicating his time to the service of his few remaining people and only assisting the Avengers when they have need of his experience.Then a strange case presents itself. A valuable artifact stolen--by a thief who somehow managed to avoid tripping the vault's heat sensors. Thor hardly dares hope, but when his dreams come true, his joy is swiftly replaced by worry. Loki has no memory of who he is, and the new relationship they build threatens to reveal buried feelings that would surely disgust him if he knew the truth. Worse still, dangerous forces are closing in around them, and they have other uses for a man with no memory.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't done the WIP-posting thing in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it's the only way I'm going to motivate myself to actually finish this, so here it is. This will update as and when I have the time, and the chapter count is approximate -- the whole thing is outlined, but sometimes things need more words than you're expecting...
> 
> Many thanks to [princerai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/princerai/pseuds/princerai) for the alpha-read, and the ever-awesome [frozen_delight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_delight) for the beta. <33

_Hong Kong  
May 2118_

The storm was still raging outside, and Xue was getting antsy.

They had the aircon in the hotel room turned up way too high, making her shiver through her hoodie, which didn’t help. (Man, she hated being the only woman; she never used to get outvoted on this stuff with Jana around.) The others gave no visible sign of nerves. Clarence tapped away at his slate, fully immersed, the implant beneath his left ear blinking with activity, while the Brit stood with folded arms before the floor-to-ceiling window, frowning out at the storm.

A particularly loud clap of thunder sounded, the lightning that followed cracking from one end of the skyline to the other, and for a moment the Brit raised his eyes as though he was looking for something.

Two years they’d been working together, and Xue still didn’t know the guy’s name. Sometimes he claimed he didn’t have one, and other times that he had a different name every day and sometimes two before breakfast, but either way, he said he wasn’t going to lie to them by making one up. (Once, he’d said that if she wanted him to have a name so badly, she could give him one herself, but that hadn’t sat right with Xue. She’d changed her own often enough, but she always thought long and hard about it first. Naming somebody else? Now that felt like way too much responsibility.)

Sure, there was the accent, which said where he was from, plus the fact that he seemed to speak every language under the sun, which said he hadn’t stayed there any longer than he had to. Not much else to go on, except that Xue was pretty sure you didn’t end up thieving with those cut-glass vowels unless you had a hell of a backstory. Sometimes she made one up for him. Times like this, it helped relieve the tedium—and it was a hell of a lot more fun than thinking about her own.

Xue got it, though. She wasn’t exactly given to over-sharing herself. Safer not to when you were in the high-stakes theft business. _Definitely_ safer not to when you had their kind of talents.

The low hum of a drone broke her reverie a second before it rose into view outside the window. “Get away from there, English,” she hissed.

“It’s not looking at us,” Clarence informed them, without glancing up from his slate.

The Brit came away from the window anyway, arranging himself cross-legged at the foot of the other bed and reaching for his tea. Which had to be cold by now. Ew. “How long do we have?”

Clarence glanced up from his slate, peering at something in the top-right of his field of vision. “Shift changes over in an hour. I’ll get the images cued up now; should give you guys plenty of time to get in and out.”

Xue rolled her shoulders and got to her feet. “Then let’s go.”

Clarence nodded, already sinking into the trancelike state he got when he was deep in the tech, communicating with it through whatever screwed-up wiring his doctors had built into his head when he was a kid. By the time the door slid closed behind them, he was gone.

Xue and the Brit walked in silence, heads down against the rain. The storm began to ease off as they threaded their way through the crowded streets, slowing first to a steady rain and then to a drizzle. Some of Xue’s nervousness started to clear along with the clouds, and when she looked over at the Brit, he wasn’t frowning anymore, either.

They ducked out of the crowds and turned down the side-street nearest the vault, pausing just out of sight of the street-level entrance. It was almost time: five minutes to the hour. Xue glanced nervously at the time-display implant in her wrist as the minutes counted down, giving the Brit a nod when the numbers finally blinked to 20:00.

A quiet murmur of voices at the entrance as the security guards on duty left for the night and their replacements took over. Inside the building, the shift would be changing over in the surveillance room, too. Just enough of a distraction to keep anyone from noticing a brief flicker on the screens, the live camera footage from the floor Xue and the Brit were heading for being replaced by an uneventful loop of empty corridors. The feeds from all cameras on one of the upper floors would switch to static, which should create enough panic to send every security guard in the place up there in a hurry.

Sure enough, a moment later one guard touched his earpiece and said, “Fifth floor. Come on,” and they both went running.

Xue and the Brit were on their heels, heading down into the underground lot as soon as the guards vanished into the elevator and out of sight. Footsteps echoed above them. Apparently the static, plus whatever message Clarence had patched into their comms, had been enough to send the whole building into disarray.

Good. That would buy them some time.

In through the first set of doors with a simple code-cracker, because Clarence could only balance so many things in his head at once, and then down into the bowels of the building. The second set of doors opened easily enough, and then the black space of the vault was ahead of them. A safe was set into the wall at the far end.

They’d moved in silent sync this far. Now the Brit turned to her and touched the communicator in his ear. “I’ll take it from here,” he said. “If we’re interrupted—”

“You’ll know about it, yeah,” Xue finished, grinning. Excitement thrummed through her veins now they were almost at the prize, her earlier nervousness dissipated like smoke. “Now quit stalling and get in there, English.”

The Brit gave her a tiny twitch of a smile, and stepped out into the vault.

If Xue had done it, a dozen alarms would have sounded right away, and a dozen guards would have been there shortly after. Infrared motion sensors, picking up any life-form that found its way within ten metres of the safe. Well, any life-form that had a body temperature higher than a day-old corpse, anyway. Who’d ever have expected that to be an incredibly useful superpower?

The safe’s locking system wasn’t hooked up to anything else in the building, plus it was probably ten times harder to crack than any of the doors leading into the vault. This was when you really needed someone who could speak the language of technology, feel it whispering inside his head and know exactly which strings to pull. Which meant hooking Clarence up to it manually, using the little handheld slate he’d repurposed himself.

Xue tapped her foot as the Brit wired it in and Clarence did his mojo. It took time, and she felt herself more on edge with each second that passed. She’d have been happier with Jana here. Not just for her muscle, but for her readiness with a joke, her ability to take Xue’s mind off the dozen things that could go wrong on any given job.

She sighed and forced her mind off that track. She could miss Jana later, when they were out of here.

“How’s it coming?” she called.

“A… little less easily than we might have hoped. How long have we been in here?”

Xue glanced at the time display. “Seven minutes. We need to hurry it up.”

“We may have to—oh. There.” The Brit’s voice went quiet, and Xue risked a glance behind her into the vault. “What are _you_?”

He reached into the safe and pulled out a black box. A little bigger than a shoebox, locked, and heavy. Some kind of metal, by the look of it. As far as Xue could see, there was nothing on the outside to give away what was in there, but then they weren’t getting paid to be curious. The Brit gazed at it wonderingly, though, running one pale hand over the surface as though he was carrying some holy relic.

“Come on,” Xue said, “we need to—”

The sound of footsteps in the corridor cut her off.

“Now!” she hissed into the communicator. “We’ve got company!”

The guard ran at her. She was _fast_ , probably enhanced, and didn’t look like anything short of a reinforced concrete wall would stop her. Xue barely managed to sidestep her, and stumbled against the wall in her haste. By the time she’d regained her footing, the guard was coming at her like a freight train again.

“Catch.”

That was all the warning she got. Then the goddamned metal box was flying at her through the air.

By some miracle, she caught the thing, though it knocked most of the breath from her lungs. The guard had turned on the spot at the sound of the Brit’s voice, paralysed with indecision, and now the Brit flew at her, knocking her away from Xue and into the corridor wall. Xue breathed hard and steadied herself with one hand, clutching the box tight against her chest.

A tinny voice sounded in the guard’s communicator. There would be others here before long, and sooner if the guard managed to alert them. The guard twisted out of the Brit’s hold and managed to slam him against the wall—not hard enough to stun, Xue thought, but he stumbled anyway.

The guard saw her opening and Xue tensed, ready to duck out of the way again—but the guard didn’t run at her. Instead she made for a panel on the wall, beside the door of the vault. Xue anticipated her movement just before she hit it with her fist, and steeled herself and opened her mouth.

The panel flashed. The alarm went off.

And Xue breathed in and gathered the sound into herself, sucked all that high metallic shrieking into her lungs and the inside of her skull, and it screamed and beat its wings there like a flock of birds, if the birds were all on fire.

The guard stared. Xue took her chance, dodging past her with the box still held to her chest and the alarm still screaming in her head. She ran for the entrance.

She ran, and she ran. Out into the sidestreet, deeper and deeper into the city, winding her way through the streets toward the waterfront. She couldn’t tell if any of the guards were following her; she just ran until her lungs burned and her feet hurt and it felt as though she’d never done anything but run. She didn’t even know if the Brit was with her until she stumbled to a halt beside the docks and he joined her a moment later, breathing hard. She looked at him wild-eyed, still unable to speak, and he shook his head in answer to her silent question.

“I think we’ve lost them.” He inclined his head toward the water, where the boat they’d secured earlier still bobbed against the side. “Let’s get out of here.”

The alarm still rang in Xue’s head, and she was weakening now, shaking with the effort of holding the noise inside. She let the box clatter into the bottom of the boat, grabbing at the side as it bobbed with the movement of the dark water. The Brit reached up and took her hand, guiding her to sit in the boat, and Xue clung onto him gratefully until she’d gotten settled.

The little boat jolted to life as the motor started up, and then it moved fast. Xue caught blurs of light in the distance: the buildings on the waterfront; the star ferries and red-sailed junks that crisscrossed the bay, loaded down with tourists. She couldn’t have told whether they were headed in the right direction otherwise, her lungs screaming, her head throbbing and buzzing with the noise she had swallowed.

It seemed like forever until the Brit spoke again. “We’re away. You can let it go.”

Xue opened her mouth and breathed out, the noise of the alarm tearing itself out of her like a storm wind.

It echoed across the water for a long moment and she froze, briefly terrified, as she always was, that the sound would bring a buzzing swarm of police drones down on them. Then it was gone, and there was nothing but the lapping of the waves and the bobbing of the boat.

The Brit touched her between her shoulder blades. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay.” Xue blinked hard and scrubbed her hand across her mouth. “Yeah, I’m okay.” She glanced up, at last—and huh, actually, the Brit wasn’t looking too good himself. Maybe even paler than usual, though it was hard to tell this far from the harbour lights, and his mouth was set in a thin line like he was trying not to puke. “How about you?”

He flashed her a tight smile. “Nothing to worry about. Let’s get to the rendezvous.”

 

* * *

 

 

Clarence was waiting for them when they landed, unplugged, for once. Xue’s head had cleared, leaving only the faint residual throb in her temple that she always got after she’d used her abilities, and the Brit seemed to have got over his fit of seasickness or whatever it was.

Not that Clarence paid much attention to either of them, hunching over the box as soon as Xue deposited it on the table. There was noise outside even at this time—the docks never stopped working—but the little warehouse backroom Clarence had rented out went undisturbed. Xue guessed it didn’t pay to be nosy around here.

She nodded at the box. “What’s so fascinating? You know what’s in that thing?”

Clarence shook his head, still leaning over it. “Not a clue. But I bet I can get that lock open without leaving a trace.”

Xue flicked him on the shoulder. “We aren’t getting paid to stick our noses in.”

“No. We should probably just leave it.” He flashed her a sideways grin. “But where would be the fun in that?” He pulled a little—well, Xue wasn’t really sure what it was, once of his homemade and slightly-illegal gadgets—out of a pocket and held it over the lock.

A beat. Then another. The lock clicked open. Smirking, Clarence lifted the lid.

It was—a book. Xue blinked. You didn’t see many of those around anymore. Plus, this one was big, heavy-looking and bound in leather. A couple hundred years old, at least; had to be.

The Brit—who’d been leaning up against the wall, fingers steepled, eyes distant—blinked and straightened up. “Do you hear that?” he asked, frowning.

Xue’s head whipped round. Clarence’s, too. “Hear what?” she asked.

“I got drones on every corner,” Clarence added. “I’m not picking anything up.”

The Brit shook his head. “No, it’s not coming from outside.” A puzzled furrow appeared between his eyebrows, and he glanced in the direction of the book. Then he shook himself. “Never mind. It’s stopped now.”

Clarence turned back to the book. “So, any guesses what our buyer wants with this thing?”

Xue made a face. “Who knows? Summon demons?”

“Well, hey, as long as they pay us.”

“Yeah.” Xue rubbed at her forehead. “Look, I saw a couch around the back. You guys mind if I crash for a while? I’m pretty tired.”

Clarence gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Suit yourself.”

Gratefully, Xue headed for the beaten-up couch in the small room next door. As she closed the door behind her, she caught sight of the Brit leaning over the book. He reached out as though to touch it and then pulled his hand back. It still looked like he was listening to something.

Xue shrugged, pulled the door closed, and kicked off her boots. They’d all had a long day. What she needed right now was sleep.

 

 

_New York_

“Sorry to bother you, Your Majesty, but you know we wouldn’t have called you in if it wasn’t necessary.”

They were always sorry to bother him; though in all his decades of assisting the new Avengers, Thor couldn’t recall once having complained. He smiled and extended a hand to Agent—Sandoz? He was fairly sure that was the man’s name, though keeping track of the comings and goings of mortals was growing harder as the years slipped by.

“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Please. What can I do for you?”

Thor had long since retired as a member of the team, his time taken up with helping the survivors of his people rebuild their lives here on Midgard. Even after a hundred years, there was work to be done every day. Though their numbers had increased over the handful who’d escaped the Ark under Brunnhilde’s leadership, they were still few, their long memories still haunted by old horrors. He would not leave them to fend for themselves.

But an Asgardian’s long memory was a useful thing, too. There was much in the galaxy no human had yet seen, and when the Avengers ran into some such thing, they called Thor.

Now, Sandoz slid a slate across the table. “Do you know what this is?”

It took Thor a moment to make sense of the image on the screen. It was a book—the real kind that the Midgardians had mostly stopped using around the middle of the last century, heavy and leather-bound like those that had lined the shelves of Asgard’s libraries. But the text on the cover was that of no language he’d ever encountered. He could not read it—and that in itself was very strange.

Frowning now, he scrolled through the next few images, these of the pages inside the book. The same unfamiliar glyphs covered the yellowing pages, this time in some reddish-brown ink.

Or it could be blood, of course. Some magicians were dramatic like that.

Sandoz was still eyeing him expectantly. Thor shook his head. “It doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Can you read it?”

“No. Where did you find it?”

“We didn’t exactly find it, though we might need to now. It was stolen. Yesterday, from the vault of a private collector in Hong Kong.”

Thor raised an eyebrow. “It must contain rare tales indeed, for a stolen book to justify the attention of the Avengers.”

Across the conference table, a young woman in a lab coat leaned forward. She’d called herself Kit; new since the last time Thor had been called in.

“There were some pretty weird background radiation readings in the area around the vault. Best guess is, they were coming from the book.” She gestured as she spoke, and the iridescent scales on the backs of her hands flashed under the lights. Then she caught Thor looking and tucked her hands into her sleeves. For a moment he thought of Banner, and felt a distant pang of sadness.

“Not of this world, perhaps?”

Kit shrugged. “Well, I’d been kind of hoping you might shed some light on that. I guess maybe it’s from even further afield than we thought.”

“Anything else?”

Kit shook her head, but Sandoz held up a hand. “There was one other thing. Not about the book—about the robbery.”

Thor nodded for him to continue.

“Whoever stole it managed to hack into the security camera feeds. But the alarms just… malfunctioned, even though there was no sign of any security breach there. They didn’t make a sound.” Sandoz frowned. “And the weirdest thing of all? The vault had fully functioning infrared motion sensors. Should have picked up anything with an actual body temperature. But somebody walked into that room and somehow managed not to set it off.”

Thor heard Sandoz’s implication: somebody not human, perhaps. His own mind supplied another: somebody born on a frozen world and yet able to walk among humans without being spotted.

Despite himself, despite everything, his heart beat hard enough that he felt it in his throat.

He’d grown practised, over the years, at quashing those small, wild sparks of hope that sprang up even now at the barest hint of possibility. His list of reasons to be cautious was well-worn, and he rehearsed it now in his mind. It had been too long. If Loki truly had pulled off one more miraculous resurrection, and he meant for Thor to know it, then surely he would have revealed himself long ago. And if he meant for Thor not to know it—well, then Thor would not know it. If Loki _had_ turned thief—that, at least, seemed within the realm of possibility—he would hardly rely on tools as crude as computer hacking to do the job. He’d hardly limit himself to robbing Midgardian oligarchs, either; not when the galaxy had so many more interesting possibilities to offer.

More than all of that, Thor had seen the light leave his brother’s eyes. He’d clutched Loki’s body to his chest as the Ark was wrenched apart around them and felt nothing but dead weight.

“Thor?” Kit was frowning at him, and he registered that she’d been saying something. He forced a smile.

“My apologies. You were saying?”

“Oh, yeah—well, there are underground labs experimenting all over, of course, trying to turn out powered people. If we could just track down—”

“There’s a quicker way of finding our culprits, actually,” Sandoz cut in. “I mention it because we’ve seen this technique before. Always thefts of rare and valuable items, usually from private collections. And six months ago, we took one of the gang in.”

 

* * *

 

 

The woman sitting on the other side of the one-way glass didn’t _look_ like a superhero. Or a supercriminal, Thor supposed. Jana Kowalska, 28, arrested for robbery in Paris last year. Brown hair that had once been dyed a deep red, fading out somewhere around her ears now. Lanky and sharp-featured, sitting hunched in on herself in the manner of somebody uncomfortable with her own height, hands tucked into the sleeves of her prison jumpsuit. The slate Sandoz had left on the table listed her abilities: superhuman strength, resilience, and extremely fast healing abilities, acquired after she’d taken part in a medical trial five years ago.

Her steadfast refusal to turn in any of her partners in crime, on the other hand—well, that, Thor suspected, was probably innate.

The door to the cell opened, and Kowalska looked round, her expression darkening. “I’ve got nothing more to say to you than I said to any of the other assholes,” she announced, before Sandoz even got the chance to speak.

He spread his hands and sat opposite her. “I’m hurt,” he said. “But uh… what makes you so sure I’m an asshole?”

She just raised an eyebrow, glancing eloquently around at the reinforced cell. “Good cop? Really?”

Sandoz mirrored her expression. “What makes you so sure I’m a cop?”

“Oh, thanks, that’s reassuring.”

This probably wasn’t going to get them anywhere. In truth, there was probably no point in Thor being here at all. His part was done, and he’d been able to offer little help in any case. Normally he would have left by now, returned to Norway and his duties in New Asgard and trusted the current Avengers to handle the business of hunting down criminals.

Perhaps, if he was truly honest with himself, he hadn’t squashed that small spark of hope quite as effectively as he’d thought.

No: he shouldn’t be calling it hope. It was just that he had to be sure. He had to know his brother wasn’t out there. Otherwise the possibility would haunt him, keep him awake through countless nights while he wondered what he might have lost for want of looking.

“How would I know what those guys are up to?” Kowalska was saying, trying to cross her arms over her chest and finding the movement aborted by the handcuffs that kept her right wrist secured to the table. “I’m just the muscle. I don’t get into the planning stuff.”

She was trying to look unconcerned, and doing a pretty good job of it, too. But her file said that she’d been captured hanging back to protect one of her partners—a young Asian woman, name and powers unknown. She was loyal, then. Perhaps not entirely beyond redemption.

“What if I told you your friends were in danger?” Sandoz tried. “This thing they’ve stolen—it could be alien. We don’t know what it might do. Neither do they.”

Kowalska put her head on one side. “If you told me that, I’d say you were full of crap.”

“Other people will try to get their hands on it. Not just thieves like you and your pals. Real nasty people.”

“We deal with real nasty people all the time.”

Sighing, Sandoz brought out his secret weapon. He set a slate down on the table in front of her.

She frowned at it. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Maybe try looking at it?”

Kowalska kept scowling at him for a second. She looked down, then, and a long moment passed before she spoke again. “That could’ve been taken anytime,” she said, but her voice wasn’t quite so steady now, and the determined set of her face wavered. “It doesn’t prove you know where she is.”

“Doesn’t it?” Sandoz leaned forward, sympathy in his voice now. “Think about it, Jana. Just help us out, just let us get that book from your friends, and you could get to see your sister again.”

“You’re lying,” she said. But when Sandoz shrugged and stood to leave, taking the slate with him, her eyes followed it right to the door.

It closed heavily and Sandoz leaned back against it, scrubbing a hand through his hair in frustration. “They weren’t lying when they said she was a tough nut to crack.”

“Let me try,” Thor heard himself say.

Sandoz blinked at him. “Are you sure? Kinda expected you to have taken off already.”

“I’m in no hurry.” It was true, really. New Asgard was a peaceful enough place, its people keeping mostly to themselves, and there was little that wouldn’t wait for Thor’s return. Occasionally he felt he was shirking duty by spending so much of his time there, and not offering his aid to the Avengers. Then he remembered how badly he had failed them before, how he’d sworn that the mission to take out Thanos would be his last, and he kept to his routine.

He offered Sandoz a faint smile. “It can do no harm if I try, at least.”

Sandoz lifted an eyebrow, but shrugged and plopped into a chair. “Be my guest.”

 

* * *

 

Kowalska looked up briefly as Thor entered the room. She didn’t seem to recognise him, but then, few mortals did, these days. In the old photographs that still circulated sometimes on Midgardian media, he wore a cape and armour; had long hair and two blue eyes, and an unwavering smile upon his face. These days, he was far fewer people’s image of a god, and those who did recognise him often seemed to hesitate and turn away instead of greeting him. It was as though he carried a grey cloud with him, one that no power of his own could dispel.

He seated himself opposite Kowalska. She looked at the tabletop. “I’m just gonna tell you what I told the other guy.”

Thor nodded. “Probably,” he said, and gave her a small smile.

She eyed him suspiciously. “So, you can go now.”

He ignored that. “Your sister,” he said, instead. “What’s her name?”

“It’s in the file, isn’t it? You people think you know everything about me.”

“I’m not—” Thor started to say, and then broke off. As far as she was concerned, they were all _you people_ , and there was no use in arguing the point. “I don’t have a slate,” he said, instead.

Kowalska kept scowling.

“You must miss her,” he said.

“What makes you so sure? Maybe we hated each other’s guts.” At that, Thor couldn’t help a soft, involuntary snort of laughter. It garnered him another suspicious look from Kowalska. “What?”

He hesitated a moment before answering. He rarely talked about Loki, these days. There was nothing that could be said to make things better, and besides, his friends all had personal tragedies of their own. Thor thought it better not to add his burdens to theirs. Perhaps that was why, even after all this time, it still felt like poking at a fresh bruise.

“My brother and I hated each other’s guts, sometimes,” he said, eventually. “There is still nothing I wouldn’t give to see him again.”

Kowalska’s expression tightened, just a fraction. “Dead?”

Thor gave a small nod.

“Sorry to hear it.”

For a moment he couldn’t think what to say. _Sorry_ was so inadequate a word, but what more could anybody offer the unknown dead? “It was a long time ago,” he managed, at last. By human standards, that was true. It also didn’t make anything better.

“All the same,” Kowalska said, “that’s just you. Not me.” She was looking at her hands, though, fiddling with the cuff that fastened her wrist to the table. She might have been able to put up a stony face when asked about her partners in crime, but not for this.

“You’re the eldest, aren’t you?” Thor asked her.

She looked up. “How do you figure?”

“How you talked about your friends. You’re protecting them, even now. That’s who you are.” It was his turn to look down. “You learn to recognise it.”

“And—what? You’re gonna get through to me, make a connection, because we’re so much alike?” She snorted. “That shit’d be a little more convincing if I wasn’t chained up in some cell and you weren’t gonna get to walk out of here when you’re done asking questions.”

“Oh, I’ve been where you are.”

She threw him a sceptical look.

“It’s true. The first time I encountered these people, they tied me to a chair.” The names change—SHIELD, the Avengers, whatever government agency is working with them now—but it’s the same thing, really. “They meant well.”

“Yeah, well, forgive me if I’m not feeling the love.”

“You and your friends,” he said, “you’re thieves.”

Kowalska snorted and hunched forward in her chair. “We do what we have to.”

“I’m sure. And you’re not dangerous. You’re not some threat to the world that needs to be stopped.”

Her expression changed abruptly. Uncertain now, surprised, defiance wavering a little. She nodded.

“But the people who hired your friends to steal this book—they may well be. Your friends likely don’t know what they’re walking into. We can help them.” He looked down. “I couldn’t protect my brother. Or any of the other people I was supposed to take care of. And that—that will never be all right. But you have the chance to help protect your friends. To see your sister again. Take it.”

His voice threatened to break a little, and he swallowed hard. Kowalska didn’t answer. Thor hadn’t really expected her to.

He stood and made for the door.

“Agata.”

Thor blinked and turned around. Kowalska swallowed, then looked him in the eyes.

“Her name is Agata.”

 

 

 

 

_Hong Kong_

“This message.” Clarence stared into space, apparently frowning at something floating in midair before his eyes, and touched the implant under his ear. “It’s… not right.”

“How so?” It was the Brit, emerging from the back room where he’d been taking a turn to nap on the couch. He peered sleepily at Clarence, as though that would somehow enable him to see the message through Clarence’s feed, and brushed hair out of his eyes.

Clarence tilted his head. “It’s the path. It _says_ that it’s from the buyer’s last known IP, and it checks out, but there’s something _behind_ it. Just a whisper, but it’s there. Something’s screwy.”

Xue sighed. Clarence’s whole speaking-to-the-tech thing was useful—they sure as hell couldn’t do their jobs without it—but she didn’t pretend to understand it. “Are you saying the message is a fake?”

“If it is, it’s a good one,” said Clarence.

“So we should get out of here,” finished the Brit. “If whoever sent it is good enough almost to fool you, the chances are they’re good enough to find us by themselves if we don’t reply.”

“Exactly.” Clarence was already on his feet, reaching for the box.

Great. At this rate, Xue wasn’t gonna get any more sleep this week. She suppressed a sigh and grabbed her jacket. “Okay. Where to?”

 

* * *

 

 

“This place is deserted,” Kit announced, emerging from the back room.

The young woman who wore the Captain America insignia these days stood at the front entrance, arms crossed, and nodded agreement. “We shouldn’t have tried to draw them out first,” she said. “They figured out the message was a fake. Lost the element of surprise.”

Thor sighed and ran a hand over his face. This was not his mission, not his command, and he’d refrained from trying to interfere. Now, he wished he’d spoken up.

There was _something_ in the air. A kind of charge, like that he’d sometimes felt in Loki’s chambers on Asgard, all those magical books and artefacts gathered together in one place. Not the same charge, of course—all those things had been destroyed along with their homeworld—but the way the hairs on the back of his neck prickled was so familiar it hurt. It did nothing to quell that stupid, stubborn spark of hope.

“Great,” Kit was saying. “Back to Square One. They could be anywhere by now.”

“No,” Thor heard himself say. “They haven’t been gone long.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Call it a gut feeling.”

What would he have done, in the thieves’ situation? Well, the answer to that was obvious: Thor would have stayed, and fought. No: they needed to think like Kowalska’s friends. Like thieves, not like heroes. Or even ex-heroes.

A memory struck him, faint and golden. He and Loki as children, bright with life and mischief, running from the palace gardens with handfuls of stolen fruit. The gardener had been hot on their heels, and Thor had been certain they would be caught at any moment—and then Mother would find out, and they’d both be sent to their rooms without any supper. Hardly a fitting trade for a few stolen plums.

Loki had grabbed him by the arm and pulled him around the corner of an outbuilding, and Thor had stared at him in confusion. “We can’t stop!” he’d protested. “He’ll catch us.”

Loki had given him a small smile and deposited his own handfuls of fruit into Thor’s arms. “Not if he doesn’t see us,” he’d said, and the tips of his fingers had flickered with green-gold light. Thor had watched, awed, as the illusion washed over them. He’d seen Loki perform small magics before, but never transform something so big as a person. But sure enough, there in place of two errant princes stood two tall sunflowers, nodding their heads in the breeze. Looking down at where his own body should have been and seeing nothing had felt so strange Thor’s head swam with vertigo, and he’d had to hold his breath to keep quiet.

It had worked, though. The gardener had peered around the side of the outbuilding, and Thor’s heart had backflipped so hard he’d thought it would leap out through his throat. Then the gardener had grunted, shrugged, and moved on to search elsewhere.

Of course, if Loki were truly here, then searching for him would be pointless. He could make himself look like anything; they could have passed him in the street already.

But that, Thor reminded himself, was an unlikely scenario. Just stupid hope, making a fool of him as it so often had where Loki was concerned.

The others were still looking at him. He cleared his throat. “They can’t have got far,” he said.  
“They’ll still be somewhere nearby. Hiding in plain sight, perhaps.”

“The docks!” Kit exclaimed. “All those shipping containers. They could’ve slipped into one of those. Crap, they could already be on a boat by now—”

“We have to look.” The Captain cut her off, already headed for the door. Thor followed.

The task would be impossible, surely. The harbour was a vast hive of activity, people and containers everywhere, and at first the search was fruitless. Thor turned one way and then another, and had no idea where Kowalska’s friends might have gone.

And then he felt it. That same prickle in the air; that same feeling of something powerful close by. His throat turned dry and his feet moved almost without his command, as though he were being pulled along by some invisible thread.

Round a corner. Another. Another.

And then he was at the darkened mouth of a shipping container and there was movement inside.

“I have them!” he called, and heard Kit’s voice in response, the sound of her footsteps and the Captain’s coming up behind him.

Within the container, a woman said, “You’re not the feds.”

The voice was unfamiliar, and Thor swallowed his disappointment. “No,” he agreed, one hand held out before him in a conciliatory gesture. He doubted Kowalska’s friends would be the kind to start a fight they couldn’t win, but it was hardly worth taking the risk. “We’re here to help you.”

Concentrating carefully—drawing more attention than was necessary risked creating a full-scale panic, after all—he summoned the barest flicker of lightning, illuminating the inside of the container with a bluish glow.

The woman who’d spoken stood huddled against one wall of the container, regarding him with the same suspicion Kowalska had worn. Surely she had to be the one Kowalska had been protecting when she got caught. She held a metal box against her chest, clutching it as fiercely as a mother with a babe. Beside her stood a dark-skinned man of perhaps thirty mortal years, the light of one of those communication implants all the humans were using these days blinking beneath his ear.

Thor had eyes for neither of them, however. He stood fixed to the spot, eyes on the tall, pale figure on the other side of the container.

As he stared, the man took a step forward, then another. Even the movement was familiar. Thor’s heart leapt. He knew, he _knew_ , even before the figure moved into the light and he found himself staring at a face he hadn’t seen in a hundred years.

A swell of joy rose in his chest—and then faded almost as quickly as it had come.

Loki stared back at him without a hint of recognition.

Thor hadn’t exactly been expecting a joyous reunion—had hardly dared expect anything at all, in fact—but now unease roiled in the pit of his stomach. He opened his mouth to speak, to say, _Brother, what’s wrong, what trouble are you in?_ , but before he could get the words out Loki moved in front of the others, putting himself between them and Thor. He looked Thor in the eyes, quite coldly.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “And what do you want?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this has taken a while! Life, and all that. I promise Ch3 will not be quite this long coming.

Xue pressed herself back against the container wall, but the stranger didn’t seem interested in her or Clarence any more. He was just _staring_ at the Brit, all the colour drained out of his face. 

“You are truly here,” he said, sounding all choked up, and he reached out to the Brit with one hand. Not a threat; not a grab or a punch. More like he meant to touch his shoulder, or his face. He only made contact for a half-second; then the Brit twisted out from under it, hands held out in front of him to ward the stranger off.

He swayed, just a little, as he moved. Like he had yesterday, on the boat. Xue had figured he was just seasick then, but they were on solid ground now. 

Shit. They really couldn’t afford for anything else to go sideways.

But the stranger held up his hands right away, a gesture of surrender, and the Brit seemed to steady himself. 

“Whatever you’re doing here,” the stranger said, “whatever trick this is—I’m not angry. You have my word. Only—it’s been so long. This time I really thought I would never see you again.” His voice was thick, like he was holding back tears.

Bewildered, Xue glanced at the Brit, hoping that he might shed some light on the situation. He looked as blindsided as she felt. 

“What are you talking about?” he hissed, fists clenched at his sides. “Why won’t you answer the question? _Who are you?_ ”

“If you guys don’t recognise him,” said a voice behind the stranger, “you might recognise me.”

Xue hadn’t even noticed the other two figures approaching, caught up in the weird little drama unfolding before her. Now, she looked. Then she stared.

Two women stood in the opening of the container. One was a white chick. Face in shadow, pale blonde hair scraped back into a ponytail, dressed in plain black body armour. Her hands shimmered faintly in the dim light. The other was all too familiar: close-cropped Afro hair, a face Xue knew from newsfeeds all around the world, and a shield bearing the insignia her predecessors had been wearing for the better part of two centuries now. Captain America, in the flesh.

This was _way_ bigger than they’d realised.

“All we did was steal a book,” Xue heard herself blurt out, shock shredding her usual caution. “What the hell do the Avengers want with us?”

“Wow,” said Clarence, looking at her sideways, “thanks for that.”

The Brit ignored all of them, eyes fixed warily on the stranger who’d walked in first. “Why do you keep talking as though you know me?” he said. “Who do you think I am?”

The stranger’s face fell. At the same time, now Xue saw him next to the others, a crazy thought crossed her mind.

She knew her history, of course. Everyone did. And she knew the stories. A secret location somewhere in Northern Europe, where a city of gods floated above the ocean, and once in a while one of them would still hop down out of the clouds to slum it with the mortals. 

Xue had seen weirder things. She’d just never expected to see—

“Thor.” Captain America, speaking with all the authority of her title. “Care to enlighten us? What’s going on here?”

Thor—holy _shit_ , it was really him—held up a hand, not looking back at her. “Give us a moment,” he said. 

For a second, Cap looked like she was going to object, but then something in his face or his voice made her nod and let the shield drop to her side. 

He stood staring for another moment, and then shook his head sadly. “You really don’t know me. You remember none of it? Not our people? Nothing?”

The Brit’s bewildered expression didn’t change. He nodded at Xue and Clarence, without quite taking his eyes off Thor. “They’re the only people I have. Sorry?” he offered.

Thor gave a short, choked-off laugh. “What happened? Who did this to you?”

Xue was expecting the Brit to say _Did what?_ , or _Nothing_ , or to demand once more to be told what was going on. Instead he was still for a moment, steadying himself, and then he admitted, “I don’t know.”

She blinked in surprise.

“Then come with me,” pleaded Thor. “We have healers in New Asgard, they could—”

“New Asgard?” said the Brit. “You’d take us there?”

Thor hesitated, the Brit watching him with narrowed eyes. “Just you,” he admitted, at last.

“Your friends are coming with us.” Cap chose that moment to step in. 

The Brit crossed his arms and looked at Thor. For a moment his expression was unreadable; then it hardened into a cool mask. “Then I’m afraid I’ll have to decline your invitation.”

Thor scrubbed a hand down his face. “I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t know you.” The Brit shifted closer to Xue and Clarence again. “And I’ll go nowhere with you until I know my colleagues are safe." Xue shot him a look, not sure whether she should be surprised or not. He didn’t return it, but gave her shoulder a brief squeeze.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Cap told them. “We’re here to help.” She turned her big brown eyes on each of them in turn. Xue could see why she’d been chosen to carry the shield: there was something direct and open about her face that made you want to believe her. You almost forgot she could pick up a car and toss it like a football.

“We were,” Clarence pointed out, “doing fine by ourselves until you guys showed up.” 

Xue elbowed him hard in the ribs. “Shut _up_ ,” she said. “They’re a whole lot stronger than we are. Don’t antagonise them!”

He glared back at her, but subsided. 

“That book you stole,” Cap went on, “is extremely valuable. Possibly also slightly radioactive.”

Xue swallowed hard, and for a moment thought she might drop the box to the concrete floor right there. She forced herself to tighten her hold instead. They’d already been carrying this thing around since yesterday. If the box wasn’t protecting her from it, then, well, a couple more minutes wouldn’t make any difference.

“And the people who hired you to steal it could be very dangerous. So we’re going to need you to come with us and tell us everything you know about them. And we’re going to need that box.”

The three of them exchanged looks. Clarence looked seriously pissed off, and Xue was pretty sure this was the scariest thing that had ever happened to her, but they weren’t going to achieve anything by getting into a fight here and now. Well, anything except getting their asses kicked and then getting hauled in anyway. As for the Brit—well, there was a look on his face Xue had never seen there before. Breathless, wondering. Weirdly hopeful. If they went along with this, maybe he’d eventually get his answers.

Really, all they could do right now was cooperate. Maybe that way they wouldn’t end up in an even deeper river of crap than the one they were currently wading through.

Xue sighed, nodded, and looked Cap in the eye. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll come with you.”

The white woman stepped forward to take the box from her, and Xue let it drop into her arms with a small flare of relief. 

“You’re doing the right thing,” Cap told her. “And your friend will be glad to see you.”

Xue’s heart caught in her throat. “Jana?” she said. “She’s with you?”

Clarence frowned. “Seriously, Jana snitched on us? That’s how you found us?”

“Don’t blame your friend for this.” It was Thor, tearing himself away from the Brit long enough to actually look at them for a moment. “We made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.”

“Agata,” Xue realised. That was all Jana had wanted, as long as Xue had known her: enough money to buy her sister’s freedom from the criminal asshole who’d taken them both in as street kids, had them augmented in his lab under the cover of a medical trial, and then pressganged them both into his own private army. “You found her.”

Thor nodded. “What else could your friend have done?”

Xue gave a sigh and followed them out onto the docks.

 

\----

 

The journey to New York was… weird. And that wasn’t just because they flew there on an invisible airplane.

The three of them sat huddled together along one side of the interior, Xue in the middle, twisting her hands in her lap now she didn’t have the box to hold onto. Clarence was fidgety too, hand going to his implant every couple minutes, though he’d been told not to switch it on. Apparently it would screw with the jet’s electronics or something. Or maybe that was just an excuse to stop them calling for help.

On her other side, the Brit sat uncannily still, watching Thor’s every move. Xue couldn’t help but wonder about that. On the one hand, the guy had always been so cagey about his past that nothing seemed out of the realm of possibility. Maybe he really had gotten tangled up with the Avengers before, and he was playing dumb so he wouldn’t have to tell Xue and Clarence about it. On the other hand… well, at this point that would be a pretty pointless exercise. Plus, he looked exactly as spooked as Xue would feel if an alien god showed up out of the blue and claimed to know her.

They’d worked together long enough, she decided. She could give him the benefit of the doubt.

She nudged him with her elbow. “You okay?”

His eyebrows drew together, but he gave her a small smile. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

Xue smiled back at him. “Well, that makes three of us.”

“It’s good to have company.”

They leaned against one another, and after a moment the Brit sighed and closed his eyes. Xue caught Thor looking at her, a little surprised, before he went back to gazing broodingly at the floor. 

It was going to be a long trip.

 

\----

 

It was late when they landed. Sometime in the small hours of the morning, Xue thought, though between napping in shifts in the warehouse and flying to another timezone, her body clock was spinning like a roulette wheel. She’d eventually managed to doze a little on the journey, with her head on the Brit’s shoulder and her feet up in Clarence’s lap, but even so she climbed off the plane yawning and rubbing at her eyes.

The white chick—Kit: Xue had heard the others calling her that—led the three of them into the building while Cap and Thor hung back, talking in low voices. Thor kept looking over at the Brit, and once even took an aborted half-step in their direction, but stopped himself, frowning. Maybe he was trying not to spook the guy by being too pushy. That was probably wise. Or maybe the Brit had already told him to back off: who knew what they’d talked about while Xue was out?

They’d touched down on top of a tall building, the wind whipping at their faces, and Xue couldn’t resist turning to look out at the glittering carpet of lights beneath them before she headed inside. She liked to get a good look at a new city when she arrived, and she couldn’t be sure she was gonna get many more chances to take in the sights. The Brit noticed her looking and did the same thing, a faintly puzzled look coming over his face as he looked around.

“Ever been to New York before?” Kit asked them, like she was a hostess welcoming guests and not effectively their jailer.

The Brit nodded. “Yes. Though it’s certainly something, from up here.” He frowned like he was trying to remember something, expression turning distant, and Kit shrugged and turned to the others.

“How about you two?”

Clarence, already headed for the door, spun around, pointed left and said, “Born right about there. It’s been a while.”

Xue blinked in surprise. She’d known that, but forgotten it, Clarence so rarely talked about his family. Kit was still looking at her expectantly, and she shook herself. “Sorry. Long day. No, it’s my first time.”

“You guys look beat,” Kit said, throwing her a sympathetic look. “C’mon, lets find you somewhere to sleep.”

“Jana,” Xue said, quickly. “You said we could see Jana.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Kit pointed out. “She’s sleeping. In the morning, I promise.”

Part of Xue wanted to protest, but the larger, sensible part of her brain pointed out that they were caught between a rock and a hard place. Or anyway, a rock and a really steep drop. They didn’t have much choice but to go along. 

Xue nodded. “Okay, yeah,” she said. “Sleep sounds good.”

Only, once she’d been shown to her room for the night—bare as a monk’s cell: just a bed, a chair, and a desk, with Clarence and the Brit in identical rooms on either side of hers—Xue couldn’t settle. She took a shower in the communal bathroom down the hall; bundled herself up in the regulation-looking pyjamas folded at the foot of her bunk; tried to pull up a newsfeed on her slate, but found that she couldn’t access the Internet. Something in the building was stopping her. So, the Avengers weren’t _that_ invested in making them feel like guests and not prisoners.

The thought did nothing to quiet her restlessness, and she got to her feet, padding from one end of the corridor to the other. No sound came from either of the other rooms. Light peeked out from under the Brit’s door. None from Clarence’s, not that that necessarily meant anything. Half the time he sat up in the dark anyway, lost in an electronic dream.

Similar, unoccupied bedrooms lay behind every other door on the corridor. One end was a blank wall; the other opened out onto a communal area with a table, a couple of couches, and a small kitchen area. This, Xue guessed, was the guest wing, when the Avengers wanted the guest to know as little as possible.

She waved a hand to switch on the lights, got herself a glass of water—after a few minutes’ fumbling in various cupboards—and drained half of it in one gulp. 

She became conscious, then, of somebody else in the room, and she turned fast on the spot, water spilling over the sides of the glass.

In the doorway, Thor held up his hands, the same careful, conciliatory gesture he’d used earlier with the Brit. He moved into the room and away from the door, leaving her a clear escape route. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

Xue breathed out and set down her glass. “It’s fine,” she said. It was, at least as fine as anything had been so far today.

Thor nodded, apparently to himself as much as to her, and pulled out a chair to sit at the table. He couldn’t seem to keep himself from glancing toward the corridor, toward where the others were sleeping.

Xue hesitated a moment, then took a seat on the other side of the table. He looked lost in his thoughts and it felt kind of intrusive to even ask, but she and Clarence had been dragged into something way bigger than they’d bargained for here, and she figured she had the right to a clue. 

“You mind if I ask what’s going on?” she said. 

“The book, it’s—”

“With you guys, I mean.”

It was Thor’s turn to hesitate. “I’m… not sure that I should tell you,” he said, after a moment. “It isn’t my place to decide.” It was weirdly apologetic. If Xue had ever imagined meeting a god, which she hadn’t, she definitely wouldn’t have expected him to sound like this.

Some part of her felt obscurely relieved, though. “I get it,” she said, and sat back in her chair. 

Thor nodded and scrubbed a hand down his face. He didn’t say anything else, though, and after a moment Xue couldn’t resist prodding a little further.

“You guys were close, though, right?” she said. “Not to pry, but I mean—” She nodded in his direction. “Nobody looks like that over somebody they don’t give a crap about.”

Thor’s face did something complicated; the kind of expression that meant either boyfriend problems or family problems, probably. “We were,” he agreed. “Mostly.” He frowned a little, then, looking at Xue. “And you? When did you meet my—when did you start working together?”

“Two years, give or take.” Xue figured giving away that much couldn’t hurt. “And well, you know what we do, so. You meet people you can trust in this business, you hang onto them.”

Thor raised an eyebrow. “You do?” he asked, with apparently genuine surprise. “Trust one another?”

Xue bristled. “Hey, honour among thieves. It’s actually a thing, believe it or not.”

The half-laugh she got in response to that didn’t make much more sense than anything else so far today. “I’ve visited realms where thieves were the most honoured in society,” he told her. “Heroes, leaders, queens. Believe it or not.”

She raised her eyes and took another swig of water. “After today?” she said. “I might just believe anything.”

Thor gave her a small smile. “The universe is always stranger than you think.” And then, quieter: “You are friends, then?”

“As much as anyone is, in this business.” 

“Good,” he said, after a moment, nodding mostly to himself. “And whatever did this to him, stole his memories—it happened before you met?”

“I… guess so,” Xue said. “I just figured he didn’t like talking about the past. Pretty common in this line of work, you know.”

Thor nodded. He looked tired, Xue realised, at least as much as a god could. There were dark smudges under his eyes, and lines on his forehead that weren’t there in the old photographs. Occasionally he reached up to touch the outer corner of his right eye, the sort of unconscious gesture people did more often when they needed to crash.

Xue bit her lip. “You know,” she said, at last, “you _could_ try talking to him.” She nodded in the direction of the corridor, and only felt a little bad about potentially landing the Brit with yet another weird-ass conversation.

The corner of Thor’s mouth twitched, as though she’d said something inadvertently amusing, but all he said was, “I guess I could.”

 

\----

 

“You’re sure that Eir can’t be spared?”

On the screen, Brunnhilde shook her head. “No way. Mette’s twins came way too early and she hasn’t left their side since. It’s still touch and go.”

Thor sighed, but he could hardly argue with that. “There are people here I can contact,” he said. “They may be able to help.”

Brunnhilde eyed him curiously. “Okay,” she said. “I’m probably gonna regret asking this, but here goes. You don’t look like you need a healer. So—who does?”

Thor squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, she was still watching him expectantly.

Well. He hoped he’d be able to keep this a secret a little longer, at least from the Midgardians. Their records of the Battle of New York were mercifully patchy, so much had been destroyed after the breakdown of SHIELD, and in any case none of them knew Loki to be anything but Aesir born and bred. But he could hardly keep the truth from his second-in-command.

He breathed in deeply. “Loki,” he said, at last.

“He’s alive? Wow, that’s. Wow.” Brunnhilde looked genuinely stunned, which was a rare enough occurrence that Thor wished he were in the mood to enjoy it. No smart-mouthed comments, no sarcasm—truly, she sounded as though she’d been hit with an axe. “So, what are you gonna do?”

“I think I’ll stay here a while. If you can manage without me.”

She gave a dismissive wave. “Yeah, you’re not that indispensable, Your Majesty.” She frowned a little, then. “But I mean… you said he wasn’t exactly a fan of humans. And the feeling was mutual.”

“That’s true.”

“So why isn’t he coming back here? Thor, if he’s done someth—”

He held up a hand. “No. It’s—nothing like that.”

“Then what? Because, no offence, you look like somebody pissed in your ale. So I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly a happy family reunion.”

Thor blinked hard before he answered. “He doesn’t know me,” he said, at last, and was surprised by the way his voice cracked. The way Brunnhilde’s face softened—that was unexpected, too. “He doesn’t remember. He thinks he _is_ human, I think.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And he didn’t believe you when you told him?”

“I haven’t,” Thor admitted. “Not yet.” A sigh escaped him. “I’ve seen spells like this before. Once, when I was young.”

“You’re barely out of short trousers now,” Brunnhilde reminded him, never able to resist rubbing in his comparative youth. Sometimes he thought this was what having an older sister was supposed to be like. 

“When I was young _er_ ,” he amended, managing a faint smile. “I was on Vanaheim with my friends and we accidentally wandered onto the property of a powerful witch. Sif stumbled into a trap that she’d set, and forgot… everything. Who she was, where we were, how we’d got there. And when we tried to tell her, it _hurt_. Later, she said it had felt as though somebody was driving hot needles into her brain. It took all four of us to subdue her before we could get her to a healer.”

Brunnhilde made a face. “Fair enough,” she said. “You don’t know that this is the same kind of thing, though. You don’t wanna hurt him, I get that, but eventually you might just have to take the risk.”

Thor sighed. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” he said. “In the meantime, I know some people who might be able to help. I’ll speak with them tomorrow.” He mustered a smile. “In any case, this isn’t your problem. Stick to worrying about Asgard.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We won’t set the house on fire while you’re gone.” 

“I appreciate it.”

She gave him a small smile. “What time is it over there, anyway?”

Thor looked around for something with a time display on it. “Late,” he said, when he failed to find one.

“Then either get drunk or go to sleep,” she told him. “I’ll speak to you soon.” A short pause, and her face turned momentarily serious again. “Thor?”

“Yes?”

“I know we weren’t exactly bestest friends, but—I’m glad he’s alive.” 

Brunnhilde’s image vanished off the screen before he could answer, but she’d sounded sincere. In a strange way, it was comforting.

 

\----

 

It was a short walk from the communal room to the single-bunk cell where Loki had been put up for the night. The quarters were far from luxurious—they were barracks, essentially, intended to house extra agents in the event that New York came under attack again—but neither Loki nor his friends had complained. Thor wondered what sort of places he’d been living in for the past hundred years.

A part of him still wanted to believe this was some elaborate ruse. Loki had foreseen Thanos’ coming and faked his death, arranged his escape from the wreckage of the Ark, and lain low, expecting Thor to be furious with him. 

He would have been, at the time. Now, though, he only ached with knowing it wasn’t true. The way Loki had moved in front of his human companions, as though protecting them—the brother Thor remembered would never have done that. He would have sent an illusion ahead of himself, or used some trickery to distract Thor and the Avengers and make his escape. The fact that he hadn’t even tried worried Thor deeply. It said that Loki hadn’t just forgotten Thor; he had forgotten himself, too. 

Thor drew in a deep breath and tapped at the metal door to the room. Loki was just a few feet away, on the other side of it, but it felt that he was as far away as ever.

For a moment there was only silence. Then footsteps, and the door opened a few inches. 

Loki eyed him warily through the crack. “Yes?”

“May I come in?”

A moment’s pause, and then the door opened fully, Loki stepping back to let him through. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture: a single bed, a desk with nothing on it, and one chair. Loki perched on the bed, the end nearest the door, and Thor waited to be asked to sit. When no invitation was forthcoming, he decided it might be best to stay standing. If he imposed, Loki might well decide not to tell him anything.

Loki looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here, or are you just going to stand there?”

Thor sighed. “I thought we should talk. In private.”

“Ah.” Loki’s eyes glinted, and for a moment he looked so much like his old self that Thor’s heart jumped in his chest. “There’s something you don’t want your super-friends to know.”

Thor shook his head. “Actually, I thought you might prefer to talk without your friends around. I’d understand if you didn’t wish them to know everything.”

“If you know me as well as you claim,” Loki said, almost carelessly, “then you’d know I don’t have friends.”

A test, or a trap. Some things never changed, it seemed. Thor smiled faintly. “I know you like to tell yourself that,” he said, remembering the few times he’d found Loki and Brunnhilde drinking together in almost-companionable silence away from the bustle of the Ark; the tiny smirk that had crossed his face, even at the last, as he’d said, _We have a Hulk_. How silently angry he’d been that the Warriors Three preferred Thor’s company to his. “But in my experience, you care a little more than you let on.”

That earned him only a sharp look. “Your experience is out of date. Though honestly, I’m almost impressed by your confidence, thinking you can blunder in here and tell me about myself when we haven’t spoken in at least a hundred years.”

Thor flinched a little at that. It was said coldly, not in blind anger, but he couldn’t help thinking of those last few awful years before Asgard’s destruction. The way Loki had spoken to him on the Bifrost, raging through tears, lashing out in cornered terror. 

But—a hundred years. The memory loss wasn’t a recent thing, then. Had Loki tried to find out what he was, in the interim? Had he believed himself a human being with lifespan unnaturally altered, like Barnes? Or had he walked among the mortals knowing he could not be one of them, but with no people of his own to go home to?

He’d stayed under the radar this long: that meant he couldn’t have kept in touch with anybody longer than a few years at a time. How lonely an existence it must have been.

Now, as ever, everything in Thor ached to reach out to his brother. To take him by the shoulders and hug him until the defensive tightness of his posture gave way; to promise him that nothing needed ever come between them again. 

It had never worked before, and it seemed unlikely to do so now. Still, he had to try. He swallowed down his questions.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he allowed. “But still, I’m here to help you, if you’ll let me.”

“Ah, yes, your help. I notice you’ve still failed to explain what that involves, exactly.” Loki cocked his head. “Could that be because you don’t actually have anything to offer?”

“There are people who can help,” Thor said. “Magicians, scientists. Whatever took your memories away, we’ll fix it. But it’s going to take some time.”

“Or you could just tell me what you know.”

He sighed. “That might not be a good idea. I’ve seen things like this before and—it could hurt you. I won’t do that.”

“Convenient.”

“You could tell me what _you_ know. What happened to you, where’s the first place you remember, _anything_ —” He saw the flash of Loki’s eyes, the defensive shutters ready to come down, and held up a hand. “But I won’t ask you to. Not right now. Come with me tomorrow, and maybe then you’ll believe me.”

Thor turned for the door. He was halfway out of it when Loki’s voice said, “Wait.”

He turned on the spot, halfway out of the door.

Loki made a face. “Don’t hover. Sit down.”

Thor did as he was told.

Loki regarded him for a long moment, a measuring look that Thor had never seen turned on him so openly. In their younger days, Loki had been loath to ever admit he didn’t already have things figured out, instead looking for his weaknesses in surreptitious glances, or when Thor was too caught up with fighting or drinking or laughing to notice. 

This, though—this didn’t feel like being sized up for a fight. After a moment, he realised that Loki was deciding whether to trust him.

“I woke up in a park in New York,” Loki said, then.

Thor nodded and didn’t speak, afraid that anything he said might break the moment.

“I didn’t remember anything. Where I was, how I’d got there. My name. Anything. So I walked into a bar. Nobody noticed. They were all staring at the TV. The bartender didn’t bat an eyelid when I walked up to her. I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and she turned to look at me.” Loki blinked. “And then she started to disappear.”

“Thanos.” It slipped out unbidden, and Thor held his breath for a moment, thinking the interruption might make Loki think better of sharing.

Loki only nodded, though. “Not that I knew that at the time. Later I supposed I must have been caught up in it somehow. Affected in mind but not in body, perhaps. But then the dead came back, and…” He trailed off, giving an offhand shrug. It looked practised. 

“And your memories didn’t,” Thor finished for him. _I’m sorry_ , he didn’t say, _You must have been so afraid_. Memories or none, he didn’t think Loki would appreciate that.

“After a while,” Loki went on, eyes distant, “I realised I wasn’t like other people. I was stronger. Faster. Colder. And I didn’t age. Some sort of mutant, I guessed, or a product of some underground lab. It seemed prudent to assume there might be… unpleasant people looking for me.”

Well, that made sense. “So you kept a low profile.”

“I couldn’t risk staying in contact with anybody for too long. Once they noticed I wasn’t getting any older, they’d start asking questions.” He looked up and at Thor, as though daring him to criticise. “And besides, I soon found my talents were as easily put to use under the radar as on it.”

Thor couldn’t help a little smile. “You couldn’t have contented yourself with a little light fraud?” he asked. “You had to start stealing priceless esoteric artefacts.”

“I tried the fraud first. It was an easy enough way to make a living, but it got dull rather fast.”

“Of course it did.”

Loki smiled back at him, just faintly, and for half a moment everything felt familiar. As though Loki was about to call him _brother_ and make some comment about how Thor wouldn’t be able to stay under the radar if he tried, and then they would both laugh.

“Just answer one thing for me,” Loki said, then. He wasn’t looking at Thor any more, and his voice was quiet. “Am I like you? Am I—human?”

Thor hesitated a moment, remembering that ill-fated trip to Vanaheim, Sif clutching at her head in agony as they carried her to the healers.

But, from the tone of Loki’s voice, he’d worked this out already. It could do no harm to confirm his suspicions, surely.

“No,” Thor said. “You’re not exactly like me, either.”

Loki nodded. “What did you call me?” he asked, then. “When we knew each other?”

“Oh, lots of things.” 

“You know what I mean.” Loki rolled his eyes. “What was my name?”

“What do you call yourself now?” 

“Oh, lots of things.” Loki fixed him with a look. “Don’t avoid the question.”

Thor shook his head. “I can’t. It might hurt you.”

There was a moment of quiet, Loki’s eyes distant. Then he seemed to gather himself, mouth setting in determination. “I’ve never kept a name for more than a year or two at a time,” he said. “Sometimes people ask who I am, and I don’t know what I’m going to say until the lie is out of my mouth.” He tilted his head, eyeing Thor like a challenge. “So you’ll understand if I’m willing to risk a headache.”

 _I’m not_ , Thor wanted to say. _I had to watch you die, and I’m not willing to risk you ever again, not even for a heartbeat._

Instead he squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them again. “Loki,” he said. “Your name is Loki.”


	3. Chapter 3

Thor didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Perhaps some stubborn little part of him had still been hoping for a flash of recognition. For Loki to call him _brother_. In joy or in anger; he would have welcomed either.

Instead Loki gave a small nod and repeated, “Loki.” He said it carefully, trying it out, and then shrugged. “I suppose it’s as good a name as any.”

Thor mustered a smile. “It is, at that.”

He resisted asking the question, but Loki answered it for him anyway: “It isn’t bringing anything back, I’m afraid.”

“Give it time,” Thor said. Loki’s raised eyebrow was enough to make him feel a fool. A hundred years had been time enough, of course; if a single word were going to trigger an avalanche of memory, surely it would have happened by now.

But, “Thank you,” Loki said, then. Thanks had always been strange, coming from him—so eternally reluctant to accept help; so impossibly determined to be an island unto himself—and now it sounded more practised than his own name. 

It was something he’d say to a stranger. Thor ached, suddenly, and found himself unable to speak. Loki watched his silence with a tired carefulness.

“I’ll let you go to bed,” Thor managed, eventually. “I’ll be in the main part of the tower. If you need anything.” He headed for the door, and then stopped. “Just one thing,” he added. “It might be best if you didn’t tell my colleagues your name. For now.” 

Though the old SHIELD had kept the name and fate of the New York attacker out of the papers, fragments of its own classified archives still survived, and he had no doubt Sandoz and the Avengers had investigated them thoroughly. He also had no doubt they would begin to wonder, if Loki stayed with them too long, for all that their official records said he’d died aboard the _Statesman_ without ever returning to Earth. He just hoped he would have Loki restored and safe in New Asgard before that had a chance to happen.

Loki’s eyes widened, and Thor could see the question in them. For once, he took the coward’s way out.

“Good night,” he said, “try to get some rest,” and he closed the door behind him.

 

\----

 

The corridor and the communal area were dark now, Loki’s friend having obviously retired to her own room. Thor lingered a moment, until the light peeking through beneath Loki’s door went out.

In the main part of the tower, the lights were still on in one of the laboratory levels. Restless, he wandered in to investigate. 

He found Sandoz and Kit hunched over a table, peering down at the old book. Sandoz spared Thor a glance as he walked in; Kit kept glancing between the book and the palm-size slate she held in her right hand. No implant, which was unusual for a scientist. Perhaps the same condition that gave her her powers made it impossible.

Something beeped. She held the slate up to look at it, then made a face and showed it to Sandoz.

“Oh,” he muttered. “Well, that’s just wonderful.”

“What is?” Thor asked, and Kit offered him the slate, not showing any surprise at his arrival.

“Just finished the DNA analysis of the binding material,” she said. “It’s human skin.”

There had been rumours of a similar sort about some of the more obscure texts in Asgard’s palace library, of course; though Thor had always half-suspected Loki encouraged them in order to keep curious interlopers away from his favoured corners of the collection. Still, it was hardly unheard-of.

Half-involuntarily, he reached out and laid his palm flat against the cover of the book. It was warm beneath his hand, almost as though it still lived.

Kit looked at him sharply. “ _Please_ don’t touch that.”

“Sorry.” Thor pulled his hand away and turned to the next lab table. A communicator sat upon it, light blinking intermittently. Clarence—the man who talked to machines—had eventually given it up, after being promised the situation would be temporary. As Thor watched, the light brightened and blinked faster, and something on the slate that Kit was holding flashed in tandem with it.

“There’s a call coming through,” she said. “The buyer’s got to be getting antsy by now. Could be them.”

Sandoz nodded. “Can you get a trace?”

“It’ll take a couple seconds. Think you can keep them on the line long enough?”

“I can.” Thor looked around to find Clarence standing in the doorway of the lab. He crossed the room and picked up the communicator without another word, thumbing over the light and holding the whole thing at an awkward angle so he could speak into the mouthpiece. “Hey,” he said, voice too loud and faux-jovial. “Good to hear from you, man.”

There was a moment’s silence while the tinny voice on the other end burbled away—the speaker was using a modulator, from the sound of it—and Clarence frowned.

“Look, we were afraid we had security on our asses, okay? Needed to wait it out. Or would you prefer we’d dragged HKS’s finest right to your door?”

Kit tapped furiously at her slate, then caught Clarence’s eye and nodded.

He made a discontented face at the communicator. “Sure, fine,” he said. “But don’t think we’re gonna hang around waiting for your call forever. If you’re so desperate for whatever’s in that box, then I’m willing to bet there are other people out there who’d pay big bucks for it too. Think fast.” He ended the call and exhaled, his bravado dissipating. “They… do not sound happy.”

“Don’t worry about them,” Sandoz said. “You’re under our protection now.” He paused, then nodded at Kit. “Well, their protection. You know what I mean.”

“They’re our problem now,” Kit agreed. Then she cocked her head. “How’d you know there was a call coming through from all the way in there? There isn’t supposed to be any signal in the barracks. Stops people giving away their location accidentally.”

Clarence shrugged. “I felt it. I’m… permanently online, I guess you’d call it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Sounds useful.”

“Sometimes is. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass.”

Kit gave a half-smile. “Yeah, I imagine it is.” She set down the slate and turned to Sandoz. “We’ve got a rough location. You wanna give Cap a call? I’ll get the jet fired up; we’ll head out there and see what we can find.”

Sandoz made a face. “Fine. But if she brains me like she nearly did last time I woke her up without coffee, I’m blaming you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kit replied. “I’m going.”

“I could go with you,” Thor offered. He’d left Stormbreaker in Asgard, as he habitually did, not wanting to give anybody in the human world the mistaken impression he was here to fight. Still, an extra pair of eyes could only be of use in finding the buyers, and his presence was certainly intimidating enough to induce most wrongdoers to talk. Though the thought of leaving Loki behind so soon stuck in his throat and threatened to suffocate him, he could not refuse his assistance.

But Kit shook her head. “We’ll handle it,” she said. “And anyway—” She broke off.

Thor frowned a little. “What?”

She shook herself and glanced toward the book. “We can analyse this thing, but we still have no idea what it means. We probably need to call in an expert, and I figure you have the contacts.”

He nodded and hoped his relief didn’t show too clearly on his face. “I’ll speak to the Sorcerer Supreme in the morning. She may be able to help us.”

“Great.” Kit turned back to Sandoz. “Let’s go.”

That left Thor and Clarence in the empty lab, regarding each other warily across the table. 

“So,” Clarence said, eventually, “you and English go way back, huh?”

Thor nodded. “We do.”

“Fair enough.” Clarence didn’t pepper him with questions the way Xue had, and for that Thor was grateful. The events of the day were beginning to weigh on him, leaving his head thick with tiredness, even if he doubted he’d be able to sleep any time soon.

Perhaps it made sense, anyway, that Clarence felt no urge to fill his head with other people’s troubles. From what he’d said, there would scarcely be room for them.

The realisation tugged a familiar cord. Perhaps it was no wonder his brother had chosen this man as a friend.

“You are… truly never able to find peace?” Thor asked. “That must be hard.”

Clarence sighed and set the communicator back on the table. “You get used to it.”

Thor gave him what he hoped was an encouraging smile. “Have you tried liquor? Some people find it helps.”

“Oh, have I. Doesn’t do much.” Clarence smiled, then. “But hey, I guess a nightcap couldn’t hurt.” He glanced toward the door. “I bet they got some top-drawer Scotch around here somewhere. Wanna join me?”

“I’ll help you look.”

 

\----

 

His dreams were strange, both vivid and incoherent at once. A jumble of sharp edges. 

There was shattered glass and twisted metal all around him, a flickering blue light as of failing electronics and a groan like a building collapsing, and he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t _breathe_ , and he didn’t want to go, there was something he desperately had to stay for, but he couldn’t remember what it was and everything was starting to turn black and he couldn’t breathe—

He was watching himself through a crack in a door. The other him sat at a table, opposite a man in a ridiculous, shiny gold robe. They were playing—chess, it looked like, though the pieces moved like none he’d ever seen before. He kept out of sight and held his breath. There was a smell like a struck match in the air, and he knew that he must not make a sound, for if he was caught—

He did not have time to finish the thought. Sleep left him with a jolt and he started upright on the narrow bed, heart racing in his chest.

It took him a moment to regain his breath; to remember where he was. The Avengers building, of all places. The memory of everything that had happened yesterday came thundering back, then, and he realised he had a pounding headache.

Thor. A half-mythic figure, barely seen since the mid-point of the last century. And the myth had walked into the place where they were hiding and addressed him as though they were old friends. More than that, even. Some part of him wondered.

It made, he supposed, as much sense as anything else about his past did. This was an opportunity. He’d never had much trust in the idea of the Avengers—nobody stupid enough to make their powers public deserved to be entrusted with the policing of the world—but he could be patient. They didn’t seem to plan on harming him, or Xue or Clarence; not immediately, anyway. So he could do as he was told, at least until he learned the truth. Who he was. What had happened to him. Where he’d come from.

Asgard? The idea was too outlandish to credit. Besides, Thor had said they weren’t alike, not exactly. Was it not more likely that they’d met sometime at the beginning of the last century, before the second alien invasion and the Resurrection?

But then, the name Thor had given him said otherwise. Loki. It came from the same mythology, and hadn’t Asgardians something to do with those old gods? They shared their names, and some rumours said today’s Asgardians were their descendants. Or even their originals—though that, surely, was too absurd a notion to countenance. 

More than that, the name had _felt_ right. There had been no flood of images, no bright and sudden clarity, only the feeling of some small thing inside him slotting into its rightful place. 

What a strange sensation it had been. If he dwelt on it too long, he would no doubt drive himself mad.

He stood and pulled on his clothes. His room looked so much like a cell that he felt a moment’s hesitation before trying the door—but it opened easily, and the smell of fresh coffee wafted down the corridor. He followed it to the communal room at the far end and found the others seated at a table far too big for just the three of them. 

Clarence managed a grunt, which meant he must be on his third coffee already. Xue picked the blueberries out of a muffin, leaving a mess of crumbs on the tabletop.

“Sandoz bought us breakfast,” she announced through a mouthful. “Maybe he isn’t so bad after all.”

“Or maybe you’re just easily pleased.” He helped himself to coffee—sugar; no cream—and slid into the chair beside Xue. 

She shook her head. “Pleased? Not until I see Jana.”

Ah, yes. The Avengers seemed rather fond of making promises they left dangling in the air and didn’t follow through on. He took a meditative sip of his coffee. “Do you think she’s really here?”

Xue frowned and put down her muffin. “Honestly? I don’t know. But I’d never forgive myself if I left without finding out.”

That was fair. He suspected he’d have said something similar if asked about his own situation. There was little they could do right now but go along with what they’d been told, and see where it took them.

Legendary hero or not, he hadn’t any real reason to believe Thor was telling him the truth. And yet some small part of him _wanted_ to. It was irrational, buried deep in his hindbrain, but getting louder. It was the same part of him that had heard _Loki_ and responded, _Yes, that’s my name._

A small frown creased his forehead, and he toyed with the handle of his coffee mug. Xue nudged him with her elbow. “How about you? Thor tell you anything else?”

“Not much.” He paused, running the conversation over again in his head. How was it that he’d ended up sharing more than Thor did, after Thor had promised _him_ answers? “He seemed to think it would be dangerous to tell me too much,” he said, after a moment.

“You think he was telling the truth?”

“You know, I actually do. He seems like the honest type.” He managed a small smile. “It’s unsettling.” 

“Tell me about it,” Clarence agreed. “All this hero stuff… Well, we better be out of here before it starts catching, that’s all I’m saying.”

Another pause, interrupted only by Xue reaching for another muffin, chocolate this time. He should probably change the subject.

The idea of sharing anything personal with his partners in crime still made his skin prickle with unease. When he’d first woken up in New York all those years ago, guarding himself closely had been common sense. By now it was instinct. Before the Hong Kong job, the sensible part of his mind had begun to tell him he’d been working with these people too long already, and soon it would be time to burn all the bridges and move on.

Then Thor had found them in the shipping container, and he’d found himself moving in front of the others as though it was his job to protect them. As though just being around them all this time had made it so he couldn’t bear the thought of watching them suffer.

It was a bad sign. A warning that he needed to leave. And now here they all were, kidnapped—albeit politely—by the Avengers, and waiting for God-knew-what to happen.

“Hey,” Xue said, then. “For what it’s worth? He seemed pretty genuine to me, too. And if he isn’t, then we’ve got your back. Even if we’re not exactly superheroes.”

He must have looked more surprised than he meant to, because she frowned at him, then, and said, “What?”

He shook his head. “They may well let you go now that they have the book and you’ve told them all you know. Somehow I’m not so sure about me.”

“Yeah, well, good luck getting rid of us,” Xue said. “I’m not going anywhere without Jana, and Clarence is way too nosy to leave before he finds out what’s going on.”

She was watching him from the corner of her eye as she said it, careful to avoid _We’re your friends_ or _You can trust us_ , or anything that would sound similarly absurd spoken by one thief to another. Perhaps it was that which decided him in the end, some tight-laced thing inside him loosening a fraction.

“Thor did tell me one thing,” he admitted. “Two, actually.”

Even Clarence looked up from his coffee, at that. “Go on.”

“You both got your abilities by accident,” he said, looking at Xue. “Or by design.” Clarence raised his mug. “I’m not like that. I’m not—” He didn’t mean to hesitate, but he did. “Human.” It sounded less strange coming out of his mouth than he’d expected it to. 

“You’re—wait, holy shit, you’re an Asgardian?”

“I don’t think so.” 

He should have begged Thor to elaborate further, risks be damned. He wanted to know, he did. And yet Thor had looked at him with such terrible caution, as though he might shatter into pieces at a wrong word. 

Glancing down at his hands, he realised he’d been fidgeting, the one little nervous tell he’d never quite managed to kick. He folded them tightly before him. “I’m… not sure.”

He waited for their rejection. In his experience, somebody being enhanced himself was no guarantee he’d feel kinship with those ever so slightly different. It was best not to expect … well, anything.

Xue gave him a friendly nudge with her elbow. “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “And hey, you know, anything we can do to help.” She glanced across the table. “Right, Clarence?”

“Sure.” Clarence paused. “Within reason. I do _not_ want my ass handed to me by any of those guys.” He jerked his head toward the door that led into the main part of the tower. “But otherwise, yeah, man. Gotta stick together.”

And it was as simple as that. For a moment he did not know what to say, so he picked up his mug of coffee and hid his speechlessness behind it.

Xue cut in, then. “You said he told you two things, right? So what was the other? Uh, if you want to share, I mean.”

“Just a name,” he told her. “He said my name was—Loki.” It felt less strange than he’d thought to say it aloud, and yet he hesitated anyway. Though he’d only known it a few hours himself, sharing it felt like giving up something dreadfully personal.

“Loki,” Xue repeated. “Like, the Norse mythology Loki?”

“I suppose.” He shrugged. “If there’s a connection, if I was named for an ancestor, or—or something else, I don’t know. That was all he’d tell me.” What—if anything—was his connection to Asgard was a question he’d turned over in his head most of the night, sitting up on the narrow bunk and failing to sleep. That had got him nowhere. He turned to look at Xue and gave a small smile, hoping it looked suitably unruffled. “That, and the fact that I shouldn’t tell any of the other Avengers about it.”

Xue’s eyebrows shot up, but all she said was, “Our lips are sealed.”

“Thank you,” he told her. “And now you know as much as I do.”

Xue looked as though she might be about to say something else, but then there was a tap at the door and it opened to admit the agent who’d been on the jet with them yesterday. He had the rumpled look of a man who hadn’t spent much of the night sleeping, but he put on a strained smile.

“Kowalska—uh, your friend’s up. You can come get reacquainted.”

Xue’s eyes widened, and she dropped her fork. Then she was out of her seat and out of the door. Clarence strolled after her, and Loki followed a few paces behind.

Loki. How easy it was to slip into thinking of himself by that name, now that it was out in the world.

Jana had always been closer to Xue than the rest of them. Best, he thought, to let them have their reunion first. That, and in the confusion of his thoughts last night, after having the promise of answers dangled just out of reach before him, he’d barely spared Jana a thought. The faint guilt of it slowed his steps.

Before he reached the door, though, the agent held up a hand to stop him. “Not you,” he said, actually sounding a little apologetic. “Thor’s got some people he wants you to see.”

Loki pursed his lips. “Good of him to assume I’ll come running when he snaps his fingers.” 

The agent held up his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” he said. “ _He_ seems to think he’s trying to help you.”

Snapping back had come almost without thinking, cutting through decades of habit. It was never wise to display emotion in front of strangers, and rarely in front of friends; Loki knew that well. Thor and his over-caution were frustrating, but it should hardly have been enough to make him slip up like this. 

His annoyance was fading already, giving way to puzzlement. He looked down, found that he was fidgeting again, and put his hands behind his back. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll be ready momentarily.”

 

\----

 

Xue just about managed not to run down the corridor. She kept well ahead of Clarence and Agent Sandoz, despite the fact that she had about half as much leg as either of them, then came to a halt at the end of the corridor, realising she didn’t know which way to turn.

“On the left,” Sandoz told her. “Hold on.” He stepped in front of her and waited before a heavy-looking metal door. There was a beep as some invisible scanner did its work, and then the door slid open, and Jana was in front of them.

She sat at a table, cradling a mug of coffee between her hands. At the sound of the door she looked up, and then her eyes went wide and she set down the mug. For a moment she stayed seated, and then she seemed to remember herself and got to her feet. 

She probably wasn’t used to being able to move as she pleased; not being cuffed to a table or told to turn around and put her hands against the wall whenever somebody entered the room. The thought stuck in Xue’s throat, and so it was Jana who spoke first.

“Hey,” she said, softly, and gave her crooked little smile. The number of times that smile had made Xue forget her fear when they found themselves up shit creek, made her able to laugh about the absurdity of the situation instead of panicking—

Her chest ached with seeing it again, and she wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying.

Jana’s arms were around her, then, and she pressed her face into the grey sweatshirt Jana was wearing and took in long, shuddery breaths. Jana didn’t quite smell like herself. The citrusy tang of the shampoo she liked was absent, and the clothes she was wearing smelled like some cheap-ass industrial detergent. But the way her hands fisted in Xue’s t-shirt, the solid warmth of her—that was real. 

It was a long moment before they separated. Xue heard Clarence saying, “Hi,” felt Jana reach out with one arm to draw him into the hug, but all she could do was hold on. This was real. 

“So,” Jana said, when they’d finally let go, “radioactive books, huh?”

“Apparently,” said Clarence. “They tell you what they wanted with it? Or us?”

Jana shook her head. “Just said it was dangerous. Or might have dangerous people looking for it.”

Clarence raised an eyebrow. “And that was enough for you to hand us over to them?”

Xue tensed, ready to get in the middle of an argument, but Jana didn’t snap back at him the way she would have, once. She just looked down. “Thor talked to me,” she said. “He made a lot of sense. And—they say they know where Agata is. If they’re telling the truth then—”

Clarence deflated. Jana had been looking for her sister so damn long. When they first started working together, she’d been upfront about it: as soon as she found Agata, she was out. He let out a sigh and nodded.

“I get it. C’mon. We’ve got breakfast.” He hesitated, then, and looked over at Sandoz. “She can come with us, right?”

After a second, Sandoz nodded. “Just—don’t go wandering around the tower,” he said. “You see a door that says _Keep Out_ , there’s a good reason for that.”

Xue’s stomach clenched uncomfortably at the reminder that they were still kind of prisoners here. What would happen if any of them tried to go wandering _out_ side of the tower? But Jana’s face lit up, and she pushed down her unease.

“Yeah,” she said, and tugged at Jana's arm. “Come on. They actually gave us the good coffee.”

“Now that’s something I’ve dreamed about every morning since they got me.” Jana paused as they headed out. “Hey, is English with you, or did something happen with you guys?” Her eyes were wide, eager for news. That was what happened, Xue guessed, when you were cut off from the world and the people you knew for a year at a time.

She shook her head. “No, he’s here,” she said. “But that’s a whole other weird story. Come on, let’s get you caffeinated.”

Jana’s hand found hers as they headed down the corridor. Xue held onto it tightly.

 

\----

 

The Sanctum Sanctorum was unimpressive from the outside, at least by Asgardian standards. Even here on Earth, it was overshadowed by the far taller buildings that surrounded it on each side. But Loki slowed and came to a halt on the steps outside, craning his neck to look up at the great round window as though he was searching for something.

“Are you alright?” Thor asked. He shoved the box with the book in it under one arm and held his free hand out to Loki, but stopped before his fingers made contact. _Say you remember,_ begged a little voice inside of him. _Say that you’ve been here before, and you owe Stephen Strange the beating of his life, and then I’ll explain that he’s already dead, but if you like I’ll take you to get icecream and dance on his grave._

Loki frowned and pressed two fingers to his temple, then seemed to gather himself. “Fine,” he said. “This place just—feels a little strange.”

Of course. The very walls of the Sanctum were thick with enchantments. Some part of Loki’s subconscious mind must have picked up on them.

Once, he would have sneered and told Thor exactly how crude and clumsy these mortal spells were, and how he could have unravelled them in a moment. Now, he only met Thor’s eyes and said, “Are we going inside?”

“That’s the idea.” Thor turned for the door, then stopped. “Though it’s probably best you don’t tell anyone in here your name, either. In fact, it might be best you don’t tell anyone at all.”

A small frown creased Loki’s forehead. “You could have mentioned _that_ a bit earlier.”

“You told your friends?”

“Well, yes.”

“Only them?” That might not be so bad. It was unlikely Sandoz would allow any of them out of the tower just yet, and they were all habitually cautious. It was the nature of the world they inhabited.

“Who else would I tell?” Loki asked him. 

Thor nodded. “And—do you trust them?”

Loki’s expression turned thoughtful. He looked a little surprised himself when he nodded and said, “I do.”

Unconsciously, Thor found himself waiting for the sting in the tail: the trick or the sarcastic aside that would pull the rug out from under that simple admission. It took him a moment to realise it wasn’t coming. 

“Good,” he said, at last, squaring his shoulders and turning back toward the door. “Just tell them to keep it to themselves for now.”

No sooner had Thor raised the knocker than they found themselves standing in a dark wood-panelled room, hardly changed since Strange’s day but for the wallscreen and the various communicators. Thor set down the box on the table, then winced a little at the heavy sound it made. 

Loki glanced around, wide-eyed. He’d shifted a little nearer to Thor, though that could just have been the teleportation. 

“It’s alright,” Thor told him, putting on a smile. “If anyone can help us, it may be these—”

“ _Who seeks entry to the sanctum of the ancients?_ ” A cloaked and hooded figure appeared in the doorway before them, face in shadow. 

This time, Loki definitely moved closer to him. Thor put out a hand again—a gesture of reassurance, or a _stay back_ , he wasn’t really sure.

“ _Answer,_ ” demanded the figure, “ _before I—_ ”

Thor nodded at the box. “We have an appointment.”

“Oh.” The figure’s shoulders slumped, and it pushed the hood back off its head to reveal a sandy-haired young man with a sulky cast to his face. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

“Marcus, if you’ve got time to harass my guests, you’ve got time to finish taking inventory in the library.” A second, shorter figure swept into the room, and Thor smiled as she reached out to shake his hand.

“Your majesty,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

“It has.” Katrina Wong had been one of the youngest Sorcerers Supreme on record when she took the job, and Thor’s mental image of her was still of a woman of thirty. He allowed himself a moment to be startled at the new lines on her forehead, the grey in her hair.

“I hear you have a puzzle for me,” she prodded. 

“I do.” He gestured to the box. “It’s slightly radioactive. I assume you won’t want to look at it here.”

“You assume right.” Wong hesitated before reaching out to touch the top of the box. “The container—?”

“Safe, I’m told. But please, let me.” He bent to scoop up the box again, and she smiled.

“If only my students had manners like you.”

He flashed her a grin. “I’m just hoping to get you on my side. I have a favour to ask of you.”

“Always happy to help the Avengers,” she said. “At least, as long as it doesn’t result in my building getting smashed up again.”

Thor laughed; but the laugh died as quickly as it had come. “It’s good of you,” he said, “but I’m not here on their behalf. This time it’s I who need your help.” He stepped aside, gesturing toward Loki. “Or rather, we.”

Wong tilted her head, studying Loki, and Thor’s heart thudded in his chest. For his part, Loki appeared perfectly calm, returning her gaze with steady curiosity. A true contrast to the last time he’d been here. 

Then, Strange had said he kept a watchlist of those he considered threats to Midgard and her people. He’d kept no files of photographs and aliases, however; Thor was certain he’d traced Loki through the signature of his magic. He had to hope that, since Loki had long been thought dead, and he seemed unaware of his own abilities, Wong wouldn’t think to check now.

A moment passed. She extended her hand. “And what brings you here, Mr—”

“Smith,” Loki said smoothly, shaking her hand. “Lucas Smith. And I was rather hoping you could tell me that, because I can’t remember. Anything, actually.”

Wong’s eyes widened. “Oh,” she said, not letting go of his hand. “That _is_ interesting.” There was more curiosity than pity in her voice, and for a moment Thor was glad of it. Loki had always been allergic to sympathy; better to be seen as a monster than pathetic. 

Then he remembered he had no idea if that was true of this Loki.

Loki only inclined his head and said, “I’m not sure whether that sounds promising or not.” 

“Come with me.”

He gave a small smile, opaque as he’d ever been, and followed Wong into the bowels of the Sanctum.


	4. Chapter 4

The building breathed around him. There was something in the walls—a presence, a crackle just below the threshold of hearing—and Loki could not help but imagine it spoke to him. If he just stopped and listened—if he only knew how to listen—

But he did not, and instead the presence nagged at him, vibrating in his bones, making sweat prickle at the back of his neck. _That_ was a familiar feeling, too often sneaking up on him when danger threatened, and he slowed his pace, taking in deep breaths before the darkness could start to creep in at the corners of his vision, before the world could start to tilt and spin around him.

A touch between his shoulder blades. He started and turned, and found Thor looking at him with wide, concerned eyes. There was a flicker of hurt there, just for a moment, but he hid it quickly. “Are you okay?”

Loki frowned and held himself a little straighter. “Fine. Thank you.”

Thor’s brow furrowed unhappily, but all he did was nod and gesture for Loki to precede him down the corridor.

 

\----

 

“Oh. Oh, wow, this is—yes. There’s definitely magic here.” 

The sorcerer stood over him, her hands moving through the air as wheels of golden light turned and intersected around him. She spoke about magic like something everyday, something to be taken for granted, and Thor said nothing to contradict her.

Loki had seen enough in his long life to know there were those who sincerely believed in it. He suspected that when they spoke of _magic_ they spoke of something real, though perhaps they called it that only because they didn’t understand it. But this woman spoke of it as Clarence spoke of computers—as though she had studied it without ever coming to think of it as something else; as though it were a science in itself. 

She looked at Loki himself like a delightful puzzle, and that, as much as the strangeness of the building and the golden light she wielded, kept him from questioning her. If her knowledge could restore what he had lost, then perhaps it did not matter much what she called it.

If. It was foolish to hope, certainly, and yet he could not help it. It was a contagion, and Thor had infected him.

The presence that had nagged at him outside the Sanctum felt a dozen times stronger here—as though it were emanating from those circles of light, charging the air and making his hair stand on end. Looking up at them, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were—familiar, somehow. How or why, he had no idea. Thinking about it felt like trying to thread a needle blindfolded. 

And it was making his head hurt. He blinked hard, forcing himself to focus on what Wong was saying. 

“It isn’t repressing the memories, though. Actually it seems like a restorative spell.” She frowned, did something that made one of those wheels of light spin, and Loki’s head span with it. If he hadn’t already been lying flat on a tabletop, he would have lost his footing. As it was, he clung harder to the edges of the table. 

Thor reached out a hand to him, but pulled it back before he made contact. Wary of disturbing Wong’s work; or perhaps of disturbing Loki. Thor’s uncertainty around him, the way he approached and backed off again, was still a puzzle.

“A restorative spell?” Thor frowned. “Then why isn’t it restoring?”

Wong peered into the circles of light. “It’s incomplete. It looks like it was interrupted by something. Cut off before it finished its work.”

“Then if I tell my—my friend what I know of his past, it won’t harm him?” Thor asked, eyes lighting up. Loki felt his heartbeat speed up, his grip on the table tightening until his knuckles turned white. This time, it had nothing to do with dizziness.

“Maybe not.” Wong tapped a fingernail against the tabletop. “It depends what you mean by harm.”

Thor’s face fell. “What does that mean?”

Wong sighed, and looked down at Loki. There was a pitying softness in her face that hadn’t been there before. Had he been feeling just a little more himself, he would have chafed at it. 

“Memory spells are tricky,” she said. “ _Memories_ are tricky. They’re not just—information you can pull out of storage.” She turned to Thor. “How you remember the past isn’t going to be the same as how he remembers it.” Here, she waved a hand at Loki, and an opaque shadow crossed Thor’s eyes. “And those things can get tangled up. They can start influencing each other. Point is, if you put your version of events into his head, there’s no guarantee it won’t… do something to his own memories when they come back. Change them, so he doesn’t see what he experienced—he sees your point of view.” She looked back at Loki. “That’s probably not what you want.”

Fighting down disappointment, Loki shook his head. That would be as good as giving up on ever regaining his own past. “No,” he said, and then looked at Thor. “Sorry?”

This time, Thor did take his hand. He clasped it in both of his own, and they were warm and strong. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’d hoped to be able to give you answers. It looks like I was wrong.” There was something else he wasn’t saying, present in the tightening of his grip and the sorrow in his eyes. It was deep and real, and Loki did not know what to say to it.

“Don’t give up just yet,” Wong told them. “It’s gonna take time. This is complex work. But if I can decipher the rest of the spell, then maybe I can reconstruct the missing part. Maybe.” 

She let her hands drop, and the wheels of golden light vanished. Apparently she was done with her work for now. Loki sat up, then immediately wished he hadn’t. Everything lurched, and black spots crowded his field of vision. 

There were hands on his shoulders, holding him steady, and he took in a long breath. Then another, and another, until the darkness cleared. When he could see again, he found Thor half-crouched before him, gazing up into his face, eyes dark with concern. 

His hand found Loki’s and squeezed it. The fingers were calloused, the palms rough—a fighter’s or a builder’s, not a statesman’s—but his touch was careful. “What happened?” he said. “Are you sick?”

Loki shook his head. “No.”

Thor only looked more worried. “Then what was that?”

“I don’t know.” Loki breathed out slowly and lifted his head. “It happens, sometimes. It’s nothing to worry about. It never lasts long.”

“Never lasts—this happens a lot?”

“No. Just—occasionally. Usually when I’m in a… sticky situation.” He hesitated; he’d never even talked to Xue or Clarence about this. What use in sharing weakness when he didn’t have to? “It’s nothing, I’m sure.”

Thor looked unconvinced. Delicately, Loki removed his hand from Thor’s grasp and twisted away from him as he stood. Thor took a reluctant step back and turned to Wong. “Does he need to stay here for you to help him?”

“Not right now.” She looked at Loki. “I’ve noted down most of what I need to start with, but I’m going to have to get you back here soon. A couple days, maybe.”

“That’s fine,” he assured her, and mustered up a smile, though it felt weak. He hadn’t really expected immediate answers, but the combination of this place, with the strange power that seemed to emanate from its walls, and the latest dizzy spell, had drained him, and perhaps the disappointment showed on his face more clearly than he meant it to. 

“A couple of days?” Thor echoed, making as though to put his hand on Loki’s shoulder again and then aborting the gesture. “How long is this going to take?”

“Difficult to say. I’ll do everything I can—but that’s the best I’ve got right now.”

Thor’s gaze dropped, and it took him a moment to regain his smile. “Thank you,” he said at last. “If there’s anything Asgard can do—anything I can do—in return…”

“I appreciate it,” said Wong. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything.”

Her smile was a firm dismissal. Thor shook her hand, hovered anxiously while Loki climbed down from the table, and at last turned to leave. Loki followed him slowly, and exhaled with relief once the Sanctum and the power in its walls were behind them.

 

\----

 

“Get over here, English!” Xue’s voice was bright and clear as they entered the communal kitchen, and her eyes shone. The table was cluttered with crockery and bottles, breakfast having seemingly turned into lunch and then into drinks, and Xue herself looked like a younger, happier version of the woman Thor had met last night. She sat pressed close to Kowalska’s side, some of the care erased from her face by the reversal of her loss.

Thor suspected that, were he to look in the mirror, the same would not hold true for him. He felt tired with the strain of hoping, restoration held ever an inch beyond the reach of his fingertips, and he could not look at his brother without aching.

Xue frowned after she spoke. “I guess I shouldn’t call you that any more, right?”

Loki gave her a small smile. “It’s fine,” he assured her, and then his eyes went to Kowalska. “Jana. It’s good to see you well.”

She made a face. “Yeah, well, it’s all relative.”

Loki raised an eyebrow, pulling out a chair to sit with his colleagues. “It must have been hard. I’m sorry.”

That, too, was strange to hear. The Loki Thor knew would have scoffed at any human suffering; would have held it as nothing next to his own short imprisonment in Asgard’s cells. 

Kowalska shrugged. “Yeah, it sucked. But there was nothing you guys could have done.” Then she glanced curiously up at Thor. “Anyway, Xue says you’ve got a way more interesting story. Seems like the big guy over there wasn’t telling me everything about why he wanted to find you guys.”

Loki cast a quick glace back at Thor. “It’s certainly been an interesting two days,” he allowed.

He was, Thor realised, being cautious. Careful of talking too freely in front of Thor.

It was not that he’d ever had unfettered access to Loki’s thoughts. He wasn’t sure that was even possible. They were complex as a maze and changeable as the sea, and he didn’t think Loki ever told the full truth even to himself. Still, he’d once thought that if Loki were to trust anyone, it would be him—and after everything, before Thanos came and ended their world, he’d been close to believing it again.

Thor forced a smile. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. 

Xue nodded understandingly. “Hero stuff to do.”

“Something like that,” he agreed, and turned back into the main part of the tower.

 

\----

 

They talked until late. Xue and Jana leaned against one another, hands linked atop the table, though Jana’s expression became distant sometimes and she went quiet, chewing at her bottom lip. Thinking, no doubt, of her sister, and the Avengers’ promise to reunite them. When she drifted out of the conversation, Xue took over for both of them, filling the silence with stories of jobs they’d worked and narrow escapes they’d had in the year since Jana was arrested.

Loki leaned back in his chair, content to let the conversation wash over him. The day’s visit to the Sanctum Sanctorum had left him drained, and with more questions than answers. Somebody had attempted to restore him; had succeeded, partially. Then he must at some time have been gravely injured. But how? By whom? And who had tried to save him, and what had stopped them?

He almost regretted not asking Thor to tell him everything. At least he would have had answers, of a sort.

But not his answers. Not his memories. He could not risk losing them completely, not now that they lay almost close enough to touch.

Clarence nudged him with an elbow. “Dude, you awake?”

Loki sat up in his chair, blinking hard. “Yes. I was just…”

“Lot on your mind, huh?” Jana said, casting him a sympathetic glance. “Xue gave me the abridged version.” She looked, he thought, grateful for something to take her mind off her own troubles. He could hardly blame her for that.

“It’s certainly… a lot to take in,” he admitted, sitting forward. At some point during the evening Clarence had produced a bottle of liquor and four glasses; Loki hadn’t touched his own, but now he took a large swallow, grateful for the burn of it going down. It was grounding, somehow.

“Yeah,” agreed Jana, “sounds pretty crazy.” She cast a glance at the door, as though expecting an Avenger to come bursting in, and then grinned slyly. “So, Thor.”

Loki raised an eyebrow. “What about him?”

“Did he tell you what was, you know—” Jana wiggled her fingers. “—going on there?”

Loki took another sip of his Scotch. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, and Xue poked Jana in the arm. 

“You can’t just ask stuff like that!” she said. “It’s none of our business.”

Jana grinned. “I dunno, if that was _my_ ex-boyfriend I’d be shouting it to the rooftops, know what I mean?”

Xue gave a theatrical sigh. “I just got you back, and already I’m losing you to a superhero? The world’s a cruel, cruel place.”

Jana elbowed her in the ribs and then leaned in for a kiss, and Loki sat back in his chair, thankful that she didn’t seem too set on pursuing the subject. For all that Jana habitually described herself as _just the muscle_ , when she was curious about something, she pursued it with the tenacity of a bulldog.

Now it had been raised, though, the possibility lodged itself in his mind and refused to budge. The way Thor had looked at him when they first met in that shipping container—he’d struggled to place it, at the time. The shock on Thor’s face had been so total, so devastated, as though he’d never once entertained the thought that Loki could exist in the world without him. What did that mean?

And the way he’d hovered close ever since, present but keeping a careful distance, unsure of the boundaries. The naked concern in his eyes back at the Sanctum, and the way his hands had found Loki automatically, as though they’d once been accustomed to touching him any time they liked. Perhaps there had once been something between then. 

Loki wasn’t sure what, exactly. But something.

 

\----

 

Thor made his way back into the main part of the tower. It was quiet, and he found himself pacing aimlessly from room to room, too restless to sit still. He thought about calling home to New Asgard, but decided against it. Brunnhilde would ask him questions, and he’d have nothing to share but his own frustration. 

It had hurt to leave Loki behind with his friends; to realise he was the intruder in that little group. He wondered now if this was how Loki had felt in their younger days, when Thor headed off on some adventure with Sif and the Warriors Three, and if they asked Loki along it was as an afterthought, silently begrudged by all but Thor. He’d been blind to it at the time. Only later, when his friends had confided, separately, that they’d never trusted Loki, had he realised it at all; only far too much later had he thought about how Loki might have seen it.

The tower was quiet. Kit and the Captain were still out on their mission, and Sandoz was nowhere to be found. Sleeping, perhaps. He’d certainly been on his feet far longer than was normal for humans.

Thor wandered through the empty laboratory, this time keeping his hands carefully off Kit’s experiments. He retrieved a watery Midgardian beer from the fridge and drank it down in one swallow, which did absolutely nothing to take the edge off his restlessness. Then he poked his head into what functioned as the communications room—a bank of monitors and perhaps a dozen different devices ranged in front of a swivel chair.

A light blinked on one of the devices, and Thor heard a faint, tinny voice say, “Sandoz? Agent Sandoz, come in.”

It issued from a headset hanging off the arm of the chair. Thor frowned and glanced around the room once more, as though Sandoz might suddenly materialize in one of the corners, then picked up the headset.

“He isn’t here.”

“Oh.” It was Kit’s voice. “Is everything alright? He said he was gonna be waiting for our call.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” said Thor. “What’s happened? Have you found something?”

Kit sighed. “Kinda. We found the address. The buyers have split, though, and they didn’t leave much behind.”

Thor sat down heavily in the swivel chair and ran a hand down his face. “Then we have nothing.”

“Not quite,” said Kit. “After we saw the place was empty, we figured we’d call in on the neighbours. See if they’d noticed anything. Most of them said not, but then this one kid—he seemed pretty spooked. It took Cap a while to get him to talk to her.”

“And what did he have to say?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure. My Korean isn’t great. But he and some of the other local kids dared each other to sneak up to the house and peek in the windows, and whatever he saw seems to have freaked him out pretty good.”

Thor raised an eyebrow. “You have no idea what that was?” 

“Not really. All he said was, the guys staying here—they were wizards. Or magicians. Or something like that. I guess they saw something they couldn’t explain and…well, yeah. Kids and their imaginations, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Thor echoed, frowning.

“There was something else,” Kit said, then. Her voice quietened, grew hesitant. “He said they had pictures pinned to the walls. Old ones.”

“Pictures of what?” Thor asked. “Of who?” 

Suspicion curdled in his gut, turning to something solid when Kit said, “Not of anyone in particular. Like I said, they were old pictures. But they were from New York.”

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://ragnasok.tumblr.com).


End file.
